Some works of fiction are named after professional terms. The terms used may have only tangential relation to the actual content of the work and be there courtesy of Rule of Cool, or be major plot points. This type of title tells the audience that the makers of the film know what they're talking about (whether or not this is actually the case).

Examples:

open/close all folders

Film

Absence Of Malice: From U.S. libel law, post-Sullivan v. New York Times: A public figure suing must show that whoever said the bad and false thing about them did so with "actual malice", i.e., they either knew it wasn't true or were recklessly negligent in determining whether it was.

Advise And Consent: The U.S. Senate's constitutional role toward executive-branch nominees.

The Black Hole: A region of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape.

Boiler Room: Financial-services industry term for a brokerage firm that specializes in defrauding unwitting customers.

The Theory Of Everything: A putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle.

SubZero: Means "beneath zero." As such, it is usually used for negative numbers, especially with regards to temperature.

Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation - In a slight twist of this trope, this Larry Niven time travel story uses the exact title of the real life scientific paper that described the possible time travel device.

Arrested Development: An inability to mature, physically or mentally/emotionally.note Also a pun, as it focuses on a family that ostensibly got its money from property development, and the main action of the show is what happens after the patriarch of the family gets arrested.

"Probable Cause": What law enforcement in the U.S. must demonstrate to legally search something under most circumstances, per the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

"Rules of Engagement": The conditions under which military forces may use force towards the enemy, and what degree of force they may use.

Music

The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd: Refers literally to the hemisphere of the Moon that is not currently lit by the sun, or figuratively to the "far side": the hemisphere that is permanently turned away from Earth.

Half-Life: The amount of time it takes for half of a given substance with a limited lifespan to decay (typically used for radioactive decay). The original Half-Life also uses this for its expansions specifically with physics related terms, although it does manage to make a Multiple Reference Pun out of them sometimes;

Blue Shift: Both a reference to the effect the Doppler shift has on light being emmited from objects approching you and the name of the work shift that falls under Barney's duties.

Opposing Force - A two-fer: a reference to Newton's laws and to an "opposing force" used in military simulations.

Mass Effect. Though the scientific term is fictional, the tone is unmistakable, especially since said term is named after a real though largely unrelated one ("mass defect", the incredibly small loss of mass lost when a process converts some of a mass to energy).

Singularity: A point at which a given mathematical object is not defined or not well-behaved, for example infinite or not differentiable.

Grand Theft Auto: The legal term for the theft of a motor vehicle in some jurisdictions (also used as a film title).

Tabletop Games

Eclipse Phase: The period between when a virus enters a cell, and when the cell is completely taken over by the virus.

Shadowrun adventure Total Eclipse: An astronomical event that occurs when a celestial object is temporarily obscured, either by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer.

Real Life

Several brands of cars are named after scientific terms: the Laser, the Proton, Nissan Pulsar etc.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy